When the Locke Gives Way to the Mill...

...and the Mill gives way to an mft meal.

With the pork sausage in the oven (in the caste iron skillet with celery, onion, garlic, bacon, some diced pepperoni, butter, a bit of olive oil, some rinsed chili beans, a bottle of Goose Island Honker Ale, and just a bit of Italian seasoning and some chili sauce), it's time to pass along some of the quotes pulled from John Locke and John Stuart Mill.

Between the two Johns, I'd recommend Mill over Locke, primarily because Locke conjures up the divine when it is entirely unecessary. He does make the distinction between why metaphysics are not to impose on a discussion concerning human nature. Why does he bring it up?: Locke is a man of his 17th century proto-Enlightenment time.

As for the 19th-century Mill, absolutely glorious thus far. In a footnote of his "On Liberty," he says, "there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered."

And he is partly mistaken in his assumption with this next quote. Mistaken because it's a quote that needs to continuously be repeated to the Moron (see Washington, D.C.): "No argument, we may suppose, can now be needed, against permitting a legislature or an executive, not identified in the interest with the people, to prescribe opinions to them, and determine what doctrines or what arguments they shall be allowed to hear." Mill never saw Sarah Palin coming.

Another of Mill's, this too pulled this afternoon from "On Liberty": "...the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."

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